I think one of the good things about the piece is that you don’t need toknow Shakespeare to appreciate it. I think a lot of people in the Arab worldhave never come across Richard III,” says al Bassam.

Really? It would be interesting to ask an audience member who has never heard the plot of Shakespeare’s Richard III what s/he got out of Al-Bassam’s play. I think it would lose a lot of its depth without the York/Lancaster background.

Richard III: An Arab Tragedy is hardly the first reimagining of Shakespeare’spopular play. The Elizabethan tale of unbridled power lust has been set in NaziGermany, in a crime-ridden American ghetto and even rendered in Japaneseanimation, or manga, as a graphic novel. This, however, is the first time thatRichard III speaks in Arabic while in the contemporary Arabian Gulf, and alBassam worked with a number of writers and a poet who specialises in Bedouinverse to get the cadence of the English adapted into Arabic. He says his focuswas capturing the rhythm, if not the word-by-word translation, of Shakespeareanverse.

The claims for the novelty and cultural representativeness of this adaptation have been scaled down over the past two years, I’m glad to report.

Because of its bilingual presentation, Richard III: An Arab Tragedy can seemat times to be two plays in one. “For the Arab audiences, they are much moretuned into the comedy of the piece and there is a quite comic element. Sothe satirical elements come out a lot more clearly when we play to Arabaudiences,” says al Bassam. “Some of the western audiences, because of theirunfamiliarity with the culture that is being presented, they are a littlebit shy of laughing.”

This is a great point. They’re shy (and so they should be! Isn’t this hesitation before laughing at stereotypes of the other exactly what our post-Saidian culturally sensitive university teaching strives to inculcate?), and they can’t always distinguish what’s meant as satire from what’s meant as straight documentary presentation of cultural facts. Which is not their fault. But it’s a fact.

Hard not to feel that Sulayman has gotten a lot savvier about the way the same piece plays to different audiences. Well, 35 performances in nine (or is it more?) countries would do that for you.